A miscarriage of justice

On 28th October 2011, at Bristol Crown Court, Dr. Vincent Tabak was found guilty of murdering landscape architect Joanna Yeates on 17th December 2010 and sentenced to life in prison, with a minimum tariff of 20 years. The evidence proving that he was made the scapegoatin a cruel and deliberate miscarriage of justice to protect the real killer is summarized point-by-point in “Guilty until proven Innocent”. The British and international news media and even the Leveson Inquiry have been muzzled to prevent them from exposing this evil scandal.

The Salvation Army chaplain

“Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour”

– Exodus, Chapter 20, verse 16

When he arrived at Long Lartin prison, about 27th
January 2011, Vincent Tabak had no one with whom he could discuss the pressing
problems that made him feel somewhere between “so-so” and suicidal. After he
was first arrested, he had been allowed to telephone his family in the
Netherlands twice a day. As a punishment for telling them he believed that he
was being made a scapegoat by panic-stricken police, he was subjected to a
sleepless night of terror in Bristol prison. His family were forced to issue a
statement saying that he was being well-treated. He was probably forbidden to
make international telephone calls from Long Lartin, and his family’s plans to
fly to the UK to visit him in prison at the time of his case management hearing
on 31st January 2011 had been thwarted by an individual ban on
visitors, perhaps as a punishment for the independent post-mortem of Joanna Yeates’s body ordered
by his solicitor.

Long Lartin prison, near Evesham, Worcestershire

Having no criminal record, nor any experience of
law-breakers, Vincent Tabak did not know anyone at Long Lartin beforehand. Most
of the inmates there had no time for academics, especially foreign ones, and
would sooner knock him down rather than give him some tips on how to deal with
the unpleasant legal advice he was getting from his own solicitor. Although he
had declined to answer nearly all of the questions put to him by the police,
and had disputed the validity of the sparse forensic evidence against him, he
had not entered any plea when brought before the magistrate or the judge.
Consequently the other prisoners and the general public believed he really was
Joanna’s killer. The so-called chaplain’s subsequent testimony in court suggests that the solicitor from Crossman & Co was advising his client to prepare to plead guilty to manslaughter, possibly because she had been told that the prosecution would be leading further evidence. This probably included “sacrificial” forensic evidence, allegedly collected from the two flats at 44 Canynge Rd., which would never be led in court. One of the reasons why the CPS had refused him bail was their allegation that he had attempted to incriminate his landlord. On the other hand, the pathologist hired by Crossman & Co had reported that Joanna’s injuries did not necessarily indicate that she had been beaten up, as the CPS had insisted – yet his lawyers had still not applied for bail on his behalf. He made up his mind to replace them.

There was also the matter related to adult pornographic videos that Vincent
Tabak may have viewed on his computers, prostitutes whom he may have
researched during business trips to Yorkshire and the USA, and illegal images of child abuse the police allegedly found on his Dell laptop computer. He would certainly
have been warned that the police would seek to
alienate and distress his girlfriend by disclosing these highly personal and
private activities to her, with all the lurid exaggerations and embroidery that
seems to be a speciality of Avon & Somerset Constabulary, and in due course he would
have learnt that they had done so.

Prison chaplain Peter Brotherton

So he put his name down for counselling by the prison
chaplain ­– not knowing that he would be talking to a Salvation Army volunteer
whose main occupation was that of Supervising Officer at another prison, and who had only just been drafted in a couple of weeks earlier specifically to
manipulate him. The court was told that Peter Brotherton had been a prison visitor since 1975, but,
unknown to Vincent Tabak, he was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, acting on instructions from the CPS and the
Home Office. He was chosen as an agent provocateur for this assignment. The court was told that he had been doing voluntary work for 35 years in
prisons – a testing environment for the integrity of even the strongest soul. He did not give any other information about his occupation to the court, though a Peter Brotherton was born in Evesham, less than 10 miles from Long Lartin, in 1939, and still lives nearby. Issue 5 of the Butler Trust’s magazine “Insight” reported the award of a Commendation for 2012–2013 to a Peter Brotherton, Supervising Officer at Whitemoor Prison, Cambridgeshire. The citation refers to his work with the transport of dangerous prisoners to and from court, and to contact with the CPS. Perhaps he received this Commendation as a reward for tricking Vincent Tabak.

Head of the CPS’s Complex Casework UnitAnn Reddrop, who must have been
instrumental in setting Peter Brotherton up
at Long Lartin to entrap Vincent Tabak

Brotherton had probably been briefed to take careful notes of each of
his conversations with Vincent Tabak, to ensure that he could not be charged with perjury. It is even possible that the conversations were tape-recorded without the prisoner’s knowledge. What was said would be subsequently edited by
“boiler-plating” selected sentences out of their original context and into a
sequence that would give the appearance of a confession. The resulting
document might possibly have been used by the lawyers to persuade the
prisoner to plead guilty to manslaughter or murder – but it it much more likely that it was not until after his trial started that he learnt from the Prosecutor’s opening speech that he had “confessed” to this person! The chaplain would also
base his testimony at the trial on these conversations, to convince the jury that
the defendant had confessed to Brotherton that he had killed Jo. No wonder “a
little bit of anger” was to enter Vincent Tabak’s voice when this Judas’s treachery eventually came home to him!

The chaplain’s first meeting with Vincent Tabak had been on 2nd February 2011, in the first cell of the health unit at Long Lartin prison, where he had been placed allegedly because of fears that he could kill himself. Vincent Tabak assumed that he could depend on the chaplain’s respecting his confidentiality, and Brotherton did not disillusion him beforehand. Brotherton posed with the suicidal Tabak as a man who could be trusted to respect confidences, an honest man one could trust and whose friendly demeanour would be in sharp contrast to all the people he had been surrounded by since his arrest.

There was a second meeting, apparently lasting only five minutes, on 5th February 2011, but what they talked about has not been made public. However, the chaplain’s subsequent, seemingly ingenuous, remark was intended to convey the false impression that the two men had NOT talked about the murder of “the young lady from Bristol” at all during their first two conversations, and even that Peter Brotherton had not heard of Joanna Yeates until now. The prisoner probably asked the chaplain to recommend him a good criminal lawyer based in Bristol to replace Crossman & Co, and was then probably given the name Kelcey & Hall. Vincent Tabak asked for paper and a pencil, and requested a further meeting with the chaplain.

At their third meeting, on 8th February 2011, two days before his 33rd birthday, Vincent Tabak
went to his cell to get his mug so he could have his water.

Recounting the conversation from the witness stand, Mr Brotherton told the court: “I shook hands with him and said ‘How are you?’. He said ‘So, so’.”

He told the chaplain,“I am going to tell you something that will shock
you”. The chaplain replied, “You tell me and we shall see”, or
words to that effect.

“The young lady from Bristol”Joanna Yeates

Vincent Tabak told the chaplain he was thinking ofchanging his plea to guilty. The
chaplain asked if this was about the young lady in Bristol. Vincent Tabak said
“yes”.

When asked if he was sorry for what he had done, he replied
“yes”.

Vincent Tabak told the chaplain thathe would find it difficult to tell his girlfriend.
The chaplain told the court that Vincent Tabak wanted to talk more, but that he
didn’t want him to, as he was getting upset. Brotherton offered to say a prayer with him, but the prisoner declined. He gave Vincent Tabak a handwritten prayer, shook hands with him and left – not stopping to think that if the prisoner were interested in communicating with God, he would want to do so in Dutch, not in English.

At this point in his testimony, the
treacherouschaplain used a breathtaking rhetorical device
to avoid perjuring himself. He explained to the court that he had gone back to the chaplaincy office, where his boss, the senior chaplain, asked him to report the
conversations to him. Peter Brotherton told the court that he had acceded to this request, as
Vincent Tabak was not religious, so “it was not a religious
confession”. Everyone would interpret this to mean “it was a
non-religious confession” – that it is the word “religious” that ‘wears the trousers’. However, the operative words were “not” and “confession” since the chaplain did not actually say, “It was a
confession” – on the contrary, if challenged, he could truthfully declare
that he had said “it was not a confession”. The senior chaplain had then reported the conversations to a security officer.

His girlfriendTanja Morson

The chaplain offered to help Vincent Tabaktell his girlfriendabout what had happened and
advised him to talk to his solicitor. This fourth encounter took place about a week later, after his girlfriend visited him in the
prison on 13th February 2011 together with Marcel Tabak and a family
friend. When the chaplain told Vincent Tabak that he had disclosed their
conversations, Vincent Tabak
replied: “Well I’m not going to tell you anything else”. The chaplain said
there was“a
little bit of anger in his voice”,and that Vincent Tabak was
nervous, and there was a tremble in his voice.

The chaplain’s reason for deliberately compromising himself was to get the prisoner unwittingly to provide a reason why the “confession” seemed to lack the most obvious thing – an explanation “Why?”

Cross-examining Peter Brotherton at the trial, Counsel for
the Defence William Clegg QC (who was not himself under oath) used an ingenious
device to pretend to discredit the chaplain’s testimony while at the same time
reinforcing the jury’s belief that the defendant really had killed Joanna Yeates. Mr. Clegg
questioned whether Vincent Tabak really had told the Chaplain that he intended
to change his plea, and went on to suggest that Vincent Tabak was “a depressed and distressed man unburdening
himself”. Counsel pointed out that the Chaplain had signed
a statement on 16th February 2011 in which he had stated that Vincent Tabak had
told him that he intended to plead guilty, not “to change his plea”.

Mr Clegg said: “Let me suggest to you there was no
suggestion of ‘changing my plea’. ‘I am going to plead guilty’ – that’s what he
said. You said ‘What for?’. And he said ‘For the crime I have
done’.” Mr. Clegg added that the defendant had already told his lawyer that he had killed Joanna. When the barrister suggested some of his evidence today was wrong, Peter Brotherton replied: “If that’s what you say, I would agree with
you.”

Counsel for the Defence
William Clegg QC

Whether the prisoner had told the chaplain that he was going to change his plea or to plead guilty made no difference, so Mr. Clegg’s quibble was just a pre-arranged gambit to deceive the jury into believing that the QC had succeeded in discrediting the old man’s ability to remember. Unnoticed by the jury and, apparently, by the judge as well, it was Mr. Clegg – and he alone – who used the phrase, “For the crime that I have
done” – not Brotherton (who was thereby saved from perjuring himself), and
certainly not Vincent Tabak. The double-act played out in court by Peter Brotherton and Counsel for the Defence suggests that the solicitor who would take over his case, Ian Kelcey, had been instrumental in setting up the chaplain as early as January 2011, even though Kelcey & Hall did not become publicly associated with Vincent Tabak until May 2011.

If the Chaplain really had signed the statement whose content Mr. Clegg claimed the witness misremembered, furthermore, then you can be sure that both the judge and the jurors would at once have thumbed through their bundles to check the actual wording, and the journalists in the press gallery would have tweeted this fact. As nothing of the kind was reported, it is highly likely that the statement existed only in Mr. Clegg’s imagination.

Peter Brotherton had been talking to murderers for 35 years,
so, as his response to the prisoner’s opening remark implied, references to
young ladies who had been strangled were not likely to shock him. On the other
hand, the jury had been exposed repeatedly, day after day, to the details of
Joanna’s effervescent life and shocking death. What shocked the prisoner on suicide
watch?

That a forensic scientist had leaked her test results to a newspaper for payment? That those test results were unsound but had formed the basis for his arrest?

That the police had leaked lies that his girlfriend, Tanja Morson, had been the “weeping woman” and that she had dumped him?

That Tanja had not been allowed to visit him.

The revelation that the police could behave so
maliciously not just towards himself, but also towards his innocent family and
girlfriend as well?

His lawyer’s suggestion that he, gentle,
shy, courteous Vincent Tabak should plead guilty to killing a girl he did not
even know, despite the manifest weakness of the case against him?

Had the CPS already offered him a secret amnesty and a new identity in exchange for an undertaking to stand trial for murder with a certain conviction as the outcome?

“Are you sorry for what you have done?” and the reference to
telling his girlfriend had nothing to do with Joanna’s death – it was actually
referring to the phone-call to the police from Holland, that he bitterly regretted as it had resulted in accusations of trying to incriminate the landlord falsely. However, it may also have referred to the allegations about Californian
call girls, adult pornographic videos and images of child abuse. For obvious reasons,
Vincent Tabak could not discuss these with his girlfriend, and was no doubt
bitterly regretting he ever went near California or opened his internet
browser.

“Depressed and distressed” he may have been, but “unburdening
himself” is exactly what Vincent Tabak did not do! He did not go on to pour out
an explanation of why and how he might have come to strangle Jo, nor did
Brotherton produce any explanation of why he had consulted the chaplain at all
– except perhaps to seek help in explaining his actions to his girlfriend,
which is the nearest the chaplain himself comes to explaining why Vincent Tabak
requested the three conversations at all. This offer of Peter Brotherton’s suggests that he himself may have talked to Tanja Morson, perhaps in the guise of a go-between.

“Things are seldom what they seem” wrote the Rt. Hon. Sir Alfred Bucknill in his 1953 book The Nature of Evidence. “History and literature hold many examples of deception imposed on credulous people... We need not go further than the Old Testament for good examples of that kind of deception. Thus Jacob deceived his father Isaac when he was old and his eyes were dim, by wearing his brother’s clothes... and telling his father that he was Esau.”

Every murderer who has ever felt obliged to confess his
crime in custody has immediately gone on to try to explain away his action,
usually by blaming it on the victim’s behaviour. This invariably happens when
he is forced to confront the fact that the detective has the evidence he needs
for a conviction, and can describe the course of events to the offender.
However, the case against Vincent Tabak was almost non-existent. Had he really
had been the person who deliberately killed Jo and gone to all the trouble to
dump the body on the other side of the Avon Gorge in Longwood Lane so as to
avoid detection, and then kept quiet about it – totally immune to the anguished
public appeals by her parents – for nearly two months, during which he was
arrested, subjected to three days of the police interrogation methods so
graphically described by Christopher Jefferies, and found out how disagreeable
prison life really was, it is amazing that a jury could be persuaded that such
a man would spontaneously “confess” as long as there was still a
chance of getting off scot-free. That neither the jury, the journalists nor the
general public were puzzled by, nor sceptical of, the timing, circumstances and
nature of Vincent Tabak’s alleged “confession” is a sad reflection on human
credulity.

The prosecution must have felt confident of their case by 4th March 2011 ­– the date when Christopher Jefferies was finally released from bail. The police may have been waiting to release the landlord until the prisoner agreed to be respresented by Kelcey & Hall. However, Vincent Tabak did not sign his “enhanced statement”, very reluctantly, admitting that he strangled Joanna Yeates by holding her neck for 20 seconds, until 22nd September 2011. An honest confession would be credible and supported by all the facts - it would not given in dribs and drabs over several months.

Bytestifying for the Prosecutionat the trial of a
prisoner who had been in his pastoral care, and breaching a prisoner’s
confidence without warning him that he might do so, Peter Brotherton completelycompromised his statusas an independent
counsellor and by implication compromised thevalidity of his own testimony. He
also prejudiced the Salvation Army’s reputation, at least among the community
of prison inmates.

Mr Clegg’s cross-examination of Brotherton reveals him slyly
collaborating with a prosecution witness to put the noose round his own
client’s neck. If the defence had not
been in the prosecution’s pocket, they would have protested about the
chaplain’s repeating this “confession” made in confidence. Any normal defence
lawyer would have advised his client not to incriminate himself by making
statements to anyone else. He would have rejected the chaplain’s statement, and
told his client to plead Not guilty. The chaplain’s account of Vincent Tabak
confessing prevented the jury from wondering why his defence team had allowed
him to plead guilty on the basis of such weak forensic evidence and in the
absence of a believable motive for killing Joanna. Had he not been tricked by the
chaplain, Vincent Tabak would be a free man today.

Mr. Justice Field

One of the main functions of a judge during a trial is to supervise the tactics of the opposing barristers and stop them whenever they lead a witness, as Mr. Clegg so spectacularly led the chaplain by prior arrangement. Judges have many years’ training in doing this. It is also the job of a judge to blow the whistle when there is evidence of collusion between a QC and a witness called by the opposing side, as there was here. If this had been a proper trial, the judge, Mr. Justice Field, would also have intervened to ask Peter Brotherton whether his final “If that’s what you say, I would agree with you” were a “yes” or a “no”. For obvious reasons, it was a non-committal answer masquerading as a “yes”. This was one of the instances where Judge Field showed his true colours.

Other critical accounts of the case

Warning

This criminal case is of enormous significance for any skilled, educated person studying or working abroad. The police, judiciary, news media, and business and academic communities have ruthlessly compromised themselves. This case has demonstrated how gullible the general public is. It has shown how easily intelligent people can be manipulated into embracing a witch-hunt mentality.

Disclaimer

This unofficial web site has been rigorously researched on the basis of published information, much of which can be readily verified by reference to online sources. However, many of the detailed reports have recently been removed from the news media's own websites. Where this account of the case contains inferences, these are usually obvious from the contexts. Some inferences are formulated as questions. A small number of key facts have been obtained by means of Freedom of Information applications, and a few others by private communication.